Buy, build, or build the missing ten percent
The standard advice is buy, don't build, and it is mostly right. It fails in a specific way for small businesses, and the fix is smaller than either option.
NOTES
Notes
Occasional writing on AI, automation, and building useful things.
What an operations platform is actually made of
The phrase suggests something large and clever. The useful version is a short list of unremarkable parts, and the cost sits almost entirely in the joins between them.
The unglamorous half of automation
Most of the automation work that pays for itself is not clever. It is removing the retyping, the waiting, and the missing trail from a process that already works.